Retirement Party – Sixth Sense

Rat Poison Recordings

Great news for the Chicagoans, jaded emo freaks, and proponents of the plainspoken: Retirement Party is back. 

After their first EP established the project as a mainstay in the DIY emo space, the group’s star turn of a debut album, Somewhat Literate, offered a crystallized batch of indie rock that remains a high-water mark of the 2010s Counter Intuitive Records Boom. Follow-up Runaway Dog was a solid collection of tracks that wound up having their potential cut short as a byproduct of their May 2020 release date. A couple of years later, a self-titled three-track EP effectively marked the end of the project, and the band’s name fulfilled its prophecy: a retirement party for Retirement Party. 

Throughout all of this, frontperson Avery Springer kept up a steady string of solo releases that leaned a bit more acoustic and twee, but remained immensely relatable and brilliantly melodic. Across this decade of music, whether it was EPs, full albums, solo projects, or weird one-off singles, practically every word that came out of Springer’s pen felt gilded, as if aimed directly at my heart. The average Retirement Party song is singable, danceable, energetic, and propulsive in a way that so much emo-ish music can be, but Springer’s voice beamed through everything, offering self-deprecating tales of anxiety and awkwardness that connected with me squarely. Sugar for the pill, I suppose. 

“Sixth Sense,” the new offering from Retirement Party, feels like an exciting expansion of the band’s established world that also acts as a bit of a soft reboot into the band’s “adult chapter.” Everything starts with a pop-rock guitar riff that hits my ears in the same way as the Barenaked Ladies classic “It’s All Been Done.” Lyrically, the song finds Springer pondering quitting music, a funny choice of topic for a comeback single, but one that makes more sense when you find out that this track was originally penned back in 2018. 

In a nice bit of connective tissue, this struggle to reconcile creating art and living life actually places “Sixth Sense” right in line with the last few RP releases, which were actively grappling with the unsustainable lifestyle that often comes with being a touring musician, especially in the DIY space. With Springer now playing and tracking every instrument but drums, it might feel like there’s even more weight on the project’s shoulders, but with that pressure comes even sharper vision. 

After all the stops and starts and years of squeezing by, it’s nice to have Retirement Party out of retirement. Springer offers the kind of voice that’s a boon to any scene it’s attached to, and we’re fortunate to have DIY lifers that continue to create art on their own terms. In the end, it's hard to put it any more concisely than the words that make up the chorus when Springer sings, “When this is over I'll look back at all that I've done / Maybe life will move slower, but I'll be happy for everyone.”